How did you feel the last time you watched a dramatic film, or saw your team perform in a sporting event? One of the reasons we find these things so entertaining and thrilling is that they give us an elevated level of suspense in our lives. If your team is winning by a country mile you’ll eventually lose interest and be tempted to go and do something else. Likewise if you don’t really care about the fate of the hero or the villain in a film then you’ll similarly lose interest. But why should we find such pleasure in events that have an uncertain ending?
Most of us prefer to have a level of certainty, understanding and security in our lives. We want to know where the next pay packet is coming from, for example, or to feel secure in having people in our lives who love and respect us day to day. So why do we enjoy putting ourselves in a position where we feel anxious about the outcome?
The circumstances that produce the suspense in many cases are imaginary. We can experience suspense while watching a film but we aren’t directly involved. If we go to the dentist and expect to have a tooth out then our feelings won’t be of a tingling suspense – they are more likely to be feelings of anxiety, fear or trepidation. Therefore experiencing uncertainty in imaginary situations forms a major part of the pleasure of suspense.
Some psychologists have theorised that due to the imaginary quality of films, books, games or the like, the emotions we experience in these situations also have an imaginary quality; that is why we can feel pleasure in what would normally be an anxiety or fear producing event. So how do we differentiate between an imaginary emotion and a real one? For example, if you regularly have anxiety attacks then you’ll know that you can experience very real emotions by thinking about certain fear producing situations. You don’t actually have to be in those situations to experience the feelings. The limbic system, the area of the brain that produces feelings of fear and anxiety, reacts to all feelings whereas the more advanced areas of the brain can differentiate between the real and the imaginary. So suspense is a real emotion that is created by a situation that we know is not real. We allow ourselves to feel the stimulation from the feelings of anxiety, but at the same time we have control over these feelings because we know the situation producing them is not real.
But why should that be so much fun? However much control we feel we have in our lives, and however certain we feel our future is, we are often confronted by certain realities: the future is uncertain, no matter how well we plan and try to control events, and therefore we enjoy stories and situations whereby suspense and anxiety are concluded with a happy ending. They give us hope that no matter what fears and uncertainties there are in life, there is hope that everything will work out fine.
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